For several years now, I have been doing genealogy research
on the early German settlers of Carroll County, Iowa. In the course of digging
into old obituaries and biographies, I also discovered a good deal of
information about the county’s German culture. As far as I know, much of this
information is relatively unknown, even to those of us with German ancestors
who grew up in Carroll County. Although some good histories of the county have
been published, none have dealt specifically or in detail with its German
heritage.

The following pages are the first drafts of chapters that I hope someday to
make into a book called The German Heritage of Carroll County, Iowa.
Additional chapters will be posted when they are ready. Some chapters are more
complete than others, but most will require much more work before they are
completely finished.

By putting these chapters on the internet, I hope that
people will become interested and want to contribute additional ideas and
information. While some sources have already been lost over time, many others
certainly remain to be discovered. I am particularly interested in hearing
from anyone having material such as old German newspapers, letters, photos,
club records, church records, or business records from Carroll County.

Likewise, any comments or corrections are certainly welcome. Although I
studied German and history in college, I am not a professional translator or
historian. I am certain I will make mistakes, and I hope people will let me
know when I do.

Traveling through Carroll County
today, one still encounters a few reminders of its German past. Some places,
like the German churches and cemeteries in towns like Mt. Carmel, Roselle, and
Willey, give some indication of the county’s German heritage, but they do not
tell the full story of the rich and lively German culture that once existed
there.

During the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many parts of the county were
actually more German than American. In addition to German churches, there
were German newspapers, German banks, German businesses, German schools,
German theaters, and German clubs and societies. In many areas of the county,
it was more common to hear people speaking German than English, and in some
towns, German was spoken almost exclusively.

The German
settlement of Carroll County began with a trickle of a few immigrants between
the mid-1850’s and early 1860’s. By 1869 to 1870, the trickle had turned into
a steady stream of hundreds of immigrants each year. During the 1870’s and
1880’s, the stream became a flood. By 1885, approximately 10,000 of the
county’s 16,329 residents were Germans. The tide of German immigration was so
strong that one of the county’s early historians, Paul
Maclean, referred to it as the German “invasion” of Carroll
County.

This invasion was actually just one
small part of a larger mass migration that had begun with the arrival of
German settlers in the American Colonies during the 1600’s. The influx
reached its peak with the arrival of several million Germans during the
1800’s. Some regions, especially states in the upper Midwest like Minnesota,
Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska and the Dakotas, attracted particularly large
numbers of German settlers.

The
results of this mass migration are still evident in recent population
statistics. According to the federal census in 2000, approximately 15 percent
of the country’s total population, nearly 43 million people, reported German
ancestry—more than any other nationality. In the Midwest as a whole, over 26
percent claimed German ancestry. In Iowa, the figure was over 35 percent.
And in Carroll County, over 60 percent of the residents reported German
ancestry.

As noted
above, relatively little evidence remains today of the culture that the German
settlers established in Carroll County. These Germans left their homeland,
and often their families, and then crossed an ocean and half a continent to
arrive there. They came from all parts of Germany and also from “Germanic”
countries and regions like Holland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, and
Bohemia. They came from all walks of life. They were farmers and merchants,
school teachers and saloon keepers, priests and nuns, blacksmiths and millers,
and veterans of wars in Europe as well as the American Civil War.

In
addition to their language, they also brought with them their way of life,
their religions, traditions, customs, and institutions. When they arrived in
Carroll County, they built a German society that endured for several decades.
For a variety of reasons (mainly declining immigration and anti-German
sentiment caused by World War I), that culture declined and then essentially
disappeared in the early twentieth century. The following chapters attempt to
recall something of the German heritage of Carroll County, Iowa.